I don't think you need to be so anal about ensuring there's no color bleeding (i.e. green in the ocean around the edges of the islands, red on the walls, etc.) It would look a bit off, but the way you have it right now, it looks like an NES game, and there's really no reason for that considering the Game Boy Color is much more powerful than the NES.

I was shocked to learn the monochrome GB even had palettes at all, considering it... can fit all its "colors" in one palette. But maybe they considered it was at least useful for fade effects and such?

(not unless they were THAT forward-thinking to think they'd eventually release a color version... someday)

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I'm sure there's a lot less to work with when you're converting a DMG game, as opposed to writing a GBC-exclusive game from scratch.

It's as simple as inserting palette data and writing code to load it. There's no real reason color conversions of Game Boy games can't make full use of the technology. What's going on here is using extra palettes to make sure no colors bleed into where they don't belong, which has the side effect of making the world map look, well... kind of bland.

I'm trying to replace some of the background elements (the Star and Moon in particular) with sprites to color them properly - not sure if I'll be able to pull it off, though. Also, keep in mind that I haven't finished editing the map.

I don't think you need to be so anal about ensuring there's no color bleeding (i.e. green in the ocean around the edges of the islands, red on the walls, etc.) It would look a bit off, but the way you have it right now, it looks like an NES game, and there's really no reason for that considering the Game Boy Color is much more powerful than the NES.

Hmm... I'll consider it. I'm not sure that's what Nintendo would do though, and unfortunately just putting together a mockup for this takes a considerable amount of time. But I don't know, it could be the best way to go.

I was shocked to learn the monochrome GB even had palettes at all, considering it... can fit all its "colors" in one palette. :PBut maybe they considered it was at least useful for fade effects and such?

(not unless they were THAT forward-thinking to think they'd eventually release a color version... someday)

It's almost a must for fade effects if you think about it - changing all the graphics each time would be really slow and inconvenient. Also, thanks to that feature we have alternating palettes in almost every game's pause screen :P

Also (in addition to being used for fades and palette-based animations), consider that the colour at palette index 0 is always treated as transparent, meaning it isn't displayed. You can't disable that, even if you don't need it. As a result, a sprite can only display 3 out of the 4 shades. If you want a sprite to seem like it is using all four shades, it needs to be displayed on top of a solid background. That isn't possible in most cases (where your sprites are appearing on top of background tiles, or even other sprites), so you do need to use the palette to pick which 3 shades work best for the sprite.

This limitation actually also applies to the GBC, it's just that you have 32,768 choices for the other three palette indexes instead of 4, and you also get to use 8 different palettes (for sprites) instead of the 2 palettes the DMG could pick from.

I think some games on the GBC cheated by changing the colour palettes during hblanks, though?

That's how the GameBoy Color adds colors right? It assigns different colors to each of the sprite "layers"? Sometimes it isn't very accurate, but it's usually good enough to correctly seperate the sprites from the backgrounds.

I managed to make the overworld look a bit better, I hope you prefer it this way. It isn't finished yet, but I think there isn't much room left for improvement.

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It looks fantastic!I would just agree with PresidentLeever on making the moon the same color as the star and that should be it The pumpkin looks fine that way, making it a tadbit darker could make it better, but if it is left that way, it would be fine